Objectively Evaluated Apparent Accommodation of Pseudophakia: Movement of the Intraocular Lens on the Optic Axis

Abstract

As an indirect measure of possible apparent accommodation in unilaterally pseudophakic patients with posterior chamber lenses, the depths of the anterior chambers were assessed by Scheimpflug slit images quantified by an anterior eye segment analysis system (ESA-1000). The fellow eye focused from 5 m to 30 cm. Twenty-three subjects, 9 males and 14 females, aged 51–78 years were examined. Controls were 114 phakic eyes of 57 patients in the age range from the teens to the sixties. In the pseudophakic group, the mean shallowing of the anterior chambers from the 5-meter baseline to attempted accommodation at 30 cm was 0.034 mm in the fifties, 0.018 mm in the sixties and 0.012 mm in the seventies. In the phakic normal controls, the values were 0.17 mm in the teens, 0.15 mm in the twenties, 0.1 mm in the thirties, 0.06 mm in the forties, 0.05 mm in the fifties and 0.03 mm in the sixties. It is concluded that the movement of the IOL was too small to affect the refractive power of the pseudophakic eyes.